Fairytales can come true, it can happen to you
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If you're young at heart
For it's hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind
If you're young at heart.
- Wise, immortal popular song, first crooned by Frank Sinatra
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If any of my dear children had ever come out to me as gay I wouldn't have turned a hair. Yet if any of them had ever come to me to say they'd become Young Liberals I know I would have been gripped by anguished despair.
"Please, please think again!" I would have begged them.
We're reminded of the heartbreaking tragedy of young people falling into Young Liberalism by the breaking news (see last Sunday's Canberra Times story Tax cuts for flag-wavers) of the ACT Young Liberals' overwhelmingly conservative and jingoism-packed agenda.
The Times reported the pubescent and post-pubescent youngsters (membership of the Canberra Liberals youth wing is open to party members aged 16 to 30) were to debate and recommend among other fogey-conservative things a "patriotism package".
The package includes tax cuts for families flying the Australian flag outside their homes and compulsory flag-flying of at least four Australian flags by every publicly owned institution.
Other proposals are that it be mandatory for all Australian schoolchildren to lisp an Australian pledge of allegiance at the start of each school day and (although I may be making this last bit up) to have the Australian flag tattooed permanently on their foreheads.
The tragedy of Young Liberalism is that it beguiles our children into unnatural conservatism, prematurely ageing them. It stunts them into fresh-faced fossils (a youngster with an old, desiccated, reactionary mind is surely a kind of obscene freak) at the very time of their lives when healthy children throb with idealism, with radical Socialist, save-the-planet, sisterhood-of-mankind dreams of revolutionary changes that will smash tyranny, overthrow injustice and usher in a Better World.
Surely society, appalled by children lapsing into being boring old reactionary farts at such a tender age, should intervene, now! Surely the tragedy of boring old reactionary fartdom (one of its manifestations a senile urge to write letters to The Canberra Times) should be resisted for ever or at least until one is in one's bitter, disillusioned, one-foot-in-the-grave 80s.
I urge the progressive Labor-Greens ACT government to set a national example here, introducing a mandatory course of Young Liberal Conversion Therapy, rescuing these adolescents from the abyss they have fallen into.
The therapy's aversion techniques (perhaps assisted by quite powerful electric shocks) could include uses of the example of the awful career and reptilian personality of John "They threw their children overboard" Howard to warn of the lifelong damage membership of the Young Liberals can do to one's soul. Howard, tragically old at heart even as boy, was a creature, from puberty, of the NSW Young Liberals.
From Young Liberals to an Old Democrat, Joe Biden.
What if Joe Biden, 81, surely in the late evening of his busy, productive life, will one day have another life in which he can get on with doing things? While he was resisting calls for him to resign, Joe Biden, bless him, kept harping, earnestly, heartfeltedly on how he felt he had so much still to do for his country, for the world. How young at heart he seems.
READ MORE IAN WARDEN:
Feeling for him, I have sent him, hoping it stokes his spirits, an intellectually brilliant argument for there being a life, and very probably a busy life at that, after death, an argument I've just read in Aeon magazine.
Princeton professor Alexander Englert's Aeon piece is We'll meet again: the intrepid logician Kurt Gdel believed in an afterlife.
We really ought to listen carefully to any idea of Kurt Gdel's because he was a towering genius, the foremost logician of the 20th century and blessed with an intellect that Einstein (who knew him and sought his company) admired and envied. We haven't room here to do Gdel's afterlife beliefs proper justice but professor Englert gives the gist of it like this:
"If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case [that there is an afterlife]. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve [because of the brevity of one human life] not even 1/1000th of it?
"He [Gdel] deepens the rhetorical question with the metaphor of someone who lays the foundation for a house only to walk away from the project and let it waste away. Gdel thinks such waste is impossible since the world, he insists, gives us good reason to consider it to be shot through with order and meaning. Hence, each of us must realise our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it."
Joe Biden is a devout Christian and so has probably imagined (as a man who likes to be busy and to get things done, is likely privately dreading it) life after death in a resort, cruise-ship bland kind of Heaven where other than harp-playing and hymn-singing, there will be nothing to do.
Gdel's persuasive notion of the likelihood of a better-than-Heaven, potential-pursuing afterlife should cheer Joe Biden, 81, up enormously, just as it has buoyed up this atheist, this logician, your young-at-heart columnist, 78.
- Ian Warden is a regular contributor.